Modern marketing is going through a period of massive disruption. Technology has lowered the barriers to entry and distribution in almost every category, which means consumers have more choices than ever before. More choice means higher expectations, not just for the quality, accessibility and price of products and services, but also for the purpose, promise, and experience of brands. Your offering needs to do more, but your brand does too.
Before you can even have a chance to meet those elevated expectations, you need to have the attention of the consumer, which is also becoming increasingly hard to come by. Every brand (and person) is now pumping out huge volumes of content. User and brand-generated content bleed together in digital feeds that it is easy to ignore, skip or avoid paid advertisements. You still need to deliver the right message at the right time, but now you can’t even count on having the attention of the consumer, even when you pay to get in front of them.
All of this is playing out in a competitive, cultural, and consumer landscape that’s constantly changing. Macro trends are hard enough to keep up with, not to mention micro ones that offer new risks and opportunities almost daily. Many brands have fallen off during this time of change, but not all…some have thrived.
The brands that are winning in this new landscape are taking a fundamentally different approach to how they think about and activate their marketing function. They are finding ways to add value to the audience they’re trying to reach by developing stories, content and experiences that people care about and want to spend time with. In other words, they are thinking and acting more like media companies than marketers.
Thinking and acting like a media company is content marketing 2.0. It’s taking the principles of an inbound approach and pushing it further, making it bigger, and doing it better. The biggest difference between a ‘media company’ model and a traditional or inbound marketing model is the focus on value exchange. Media companies are focused on adding value to the audience they’re trying to reach. Their business is about attracting and engaging an audience by producing content and experiences they want to spend time with. Traditional marketers are focused on extracting value from an audience by getting them to take action that benefits the business.
Now, the role of marketing is to drive the growth of the business. Building a media company around your brand isn’t about investing with no expectation of a return. Media companies extract value from their audience by monetising them. But they do it only after they have delivered value through content and experiences. The difference between the two models is in the sequence of the value exchange: are you prioritizing the needs of your audience or your business first?
The media mindset is what wins in the hyper-competitive landscape of today. If you focus on adding value, you will bring the audience to you. Your content will stand out and earn attention instead of blending in and being ignored. You will own your audience instead of having to rent it in other advertising channels (which, by the way, is increasingly important in a post-cookie, first-party data world). Once you have an attentive, engaged audience to whom you’ve delivered value upfront, you can then extract value for your business. You need to compete and win for attention first, then conversion.
Here are three steps to get started building a media company around your brand:
- Define the relevant but differentiated POV you have on the industry. You likely already have a brand strategy. And it’s likely relevant to what you do and who you do it for. But be honest with yourself, is it differentiated? It’s no longer enough to just be relevant, you need to offer a purpose and promise that’s different from everyone else. Here’s one gut check you can use to see if your brand is truly differentiated: If you take your logo off your marketing campaigns, could it be any other brand? (You want the answer to be no). You need this POV to guide the content and experiences you create to a place where they’re offering more or different value from what consumers can get elsewhere.
- Identify the “sources” of content that you can tap into on an ongoing basis. Just like a journalist at a media company, you need to think about the sources you can go to for quality content. They could be employees, customers, or external partners. But someone or something needs to be the well of ideas, insights, and inspiration for the pipeline of value you’re looking to bring to market.
- Map the attention of your audience and focus on the channels where the attention is underpriced. Attention is the most valuable and scarcest commodity in modern marketing. You need to analyze where the attention you need already exists, but also look at where your competitors are already mining it. Often times you can find underpriced attention in new media platforms before they become accepted at scale (e.g. TikTok). Sometimes you can find it in old media platforms that have introduced new ways to find and reach an audience (e.g. Connected TV). And you can always find it with a bit of creativity to “growth hack” your distribution on any platform (e.g. influencers on Instagram, content that goes “viral”).
If you do one thing differently after reading this article, sit down and think about the value exchange that your marketing offers between your business and your customers. The more you can focus on adding value, the better your marketing will be. Make value your North Star and you will always find ways to make marketing people want to spend time with and build a brand people care about. Media, not marketing.
